He was holding on to the last figments of his fragmented dream when he felt his handphone vibrating.

Joonmyun struggled to shake off the fuzziness clouding his mind and checked the text message.

It's Sehun.

He had been waiting out for the subject at the tip off point- a ramshackle of a house in the suburbs.

"No sight of him. Changing shift at 7am?"

The two of them had been on this case for quite some time and Joonmyun was sure the tunnel was coming to an end. It's just that the light at the end of the tunnel was looking as dusky as the sky right now.

He glanced at the clock. 6am.

"730. Will be bringing breakfast." He texted back.

Joonmyun snapped his laptop shut and searched for the address in one of the files, unwittingly surveying the boy's photo again.

Kim Jongin.

The mother was forced to marry a man she didn't love and when the one she did appeared, she made a decision. A decision that haunted her for the rest of her life. The second marriage ended with her partner's infidelity. She wanted to find the person she abandoned due to her selfish decision.

She was precarious at first. But Joonmyun assured her if she changed her mind, they would abort the case anytime. With every new clue and lead, her hopes heightened. Now that success was seemingly close, however, his client seemed more and more fidgety, especially with the recent discoverings of her son's smudgy records with the law.

Joonmyun wasn't sure whether it's the reality she had imagined.

Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don't.

Dreams.

Joonmyun started living his because of his father. He had a pretty normal childhood. Humble background and hardworking parents. His father used to work as a saxophonist in a band before he married his mother. Joonmyun grew up listening to Stan Getz and Bud Freeman. Little Joonmyun sensed his father's pride and joy when he was jamming with his band. However, a few years later, his father quit the band and got a day job as an administrative worker in return for a higher salary. Even though Joonmyun was young, he could see that his father missed his nightly jammings. He would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to pee and find his father standing next to the saxophone with a wispy look, but never once did he see him picking it up. He just sat there and stared into the far distant.

When his father passed away 4 years ago, two of his band members turned up at the funeral and played a short piece of "I'll remember Clifford" on the saxophones. They buried one saxophone with him. 

Before they left, one of them held Joonmyun by the shoulders and said in a voice trembling from suppressed emotions, "It's your father's dream, you know, to perform on the stage til he dies. But... he couldn't. Life is... hard as a musician and he had a family and... he couldn't." The man squeezed his shoulders again. At that moment, Joonmyun felt a weird pang of guilt.

As if he was the one who snuffed out his father's dreams.

When Joonmyun started the freelance odd jobs with his three friends in high school, part of him felt that he was helping people live their dreams. When he saw how a 45 years old widow held on to hers even during her end hours, he was touched. He never expected his three friends's support for so long though. They looked up to him like a leader. Even though he was the oldest one in the group, he figured being the only one who experienced death in the family forced him to mature more quickly than his peers.

He never told them, but he almost felt apologetic they were involved in this personal selfish pursuit of his. Nor had he imagined they having survived quite substantially through out the years with this.

Closing the file, Joonmyun headed to the bathroom in preparation for the shift change with Sehun.